This is How it Happens

Any college town, USA. Saturday night. Party at the frat house. Lots of beer, bottles of Jagermeister floating around, and of course one of the high-level frat brothers is in charge of supplying the roofies (not that any of the female guests are to KNOW if and when they’ve been plied with said roofies). Maybe there’s a few “distinguished alumni” who show up at this shindig to relive their so-called glory days.

Whatever.

The music is so goddamn loud it can be heard from outer space, it’s ALWAYS gangsta rap (why do white boys in frat houses think they’re so gangsta?) . By the time the girls start to arrive, the guys are not drunk YET, but they’re not quite sober either. They’ve all definitely had a few, they each have this idea that they’ere gonna get lucky.

The girls start to arrive & it’s clear they’ve put effort into their hair, wardrobe, and makeup. They came to see and be seen, they wanna be known for being cute. They’re also young and inexperienced…they don’t yet know the math of booze and body weight and how much does it take to knock you on your ass. They also don’t know the guys are spiking their drinks with roofies. And somewhere in between the late Biggie Smalls’ Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems and I Like It When You Call Me Big Pappa, one of those cute girls disintegrates into a crumpled heap on a couch or the floor. Yeah, beer + jager + roofies = passed the fuck out. Maybe it’s the girl who never parties & was dragged to this kegger by her roomate. Maybe it’s the girl who is ALWAYS bombed, the one they call the campus lush. Doesn’t really matter, does it.

The cute girl who disintegrated into the heap on the couch or the floor is carried into a bedroom and plopped onto a bed. She needs to sleep it off. And if she gets to sleep alone, I’ll eat my hat, I’ll personally go on a tour of every college in the US and apologize to frat boys the country over for writing this, because this is the story of what happens when she doesn’t get to sleep it off in peace alone. No, this is a darker tale.

This is about what happens when one (or more) of the frat brothers decides to be intimate with the passed out girl. Only there’s nothing intimate about a grunting asshole on top of, next to, behind, and inside of, a sleeping woman. It’s disgusting rather than intimate, what with her not consenting and him not wanting to be with someone who can consent.

After, the whole frat finds out…that’s just what a frat brother does, he tells the whole goddamn house when he penetrates something. If the poor, unsuspecting woman doesn’t wake up during his intrusion of her body, then she finds out on campus as the rumor spreads, and that’s a horrible way to find out you’ve been violated.

Worse, though, than finding out she’s been violated, is finding out that it happened inside a house FULL of people, and none of them did anything. Some of them even blame her, they say things like “But you drank so much that night,” as though once you ingest a certain amount of alcohol, you’re signalling a willingness to be violated, or they tell her, “You wore that low-cut thing with the short skirt, what did you expect?” as if she was supposed to wear a nun’s habit to a party in order to not be violated.

The whole thing leaves her mad as all hell. She stops wearing the low-cut things with the short skirts, and starts wearing jeans & loose-fitting T-shirts so nobody can see what her figure looks like. She even stops wearing makeup. She still goes to the frat house on party night, but she doesn’t go in…No, she stands outside the frat house and screams that the frat boys are rapists and when the rent-a-cop from campus security tells her to move along, she says she’s just there to warn other women not to go in there. The RA (resident advisor) at her dorm suggests she get some type of counseling, and she tells the RA to fuck off…then she goes to the next frat party, stands outside, and screams again. Counseling is not an option for her…counseling is for crazy people and she’s not crazy.

She gets mace, pepper spray, and a taser (and YES, the taser is illegal, as in it’s illegal for a private citizen, a non-law enforcement personnel to have it) but she insists she needs these things to defend herself while walking on campus in case anyone attempts to attack her. She cuts her hair really short, and between that and her outfits these days, she’s sometimes mistaken for a man, but she doesn’t care. She takes courses in women’s studies, goes to “take back the night” rallies.

Meanwhile, the frat brother who violated her that night goes on living as if it didn’t happen. His brothers high-five him and say he’s a “player”, the morning after. There are parties at the frat house the next weekend and every other weekend after that, and the brothers take turns getting lucky with various cute girls who disintegrate into heaps on floors or couches due to the combination of beer, jager, and roofies. They never understand why some girls who used to be really cute turn into what they consider to be crazy bitches, cutting their hair & wearing those awful baggy clothes…they’re only happy the ones who turn into crazy bitches don’t come to the parties because nobody wants to bang a crazy bitch. No matter how much jager a frat brother drinks, he wouldn’t bang one of those crazy bitches. Of course, some of the girls disappear altogether, they just disappear from campus as though they never existed. Not that the frat brothers notice, they’re too busy partying.

The scary thing is that the frat brothers graduate. I don’t know how they have time to go to class, they’re always partying, drinking, and/or hungover from what they did the night before, but every one of those assholes graduates somehow. They get degrees in finance, graphic design, biology, or whatever, is that they can get away with it, that they can do whatever they want to the cute girls who pass out, and no one will find out. And that makes them dangerous people.